In several engineering fields there is a strong tendency to increase the amount of parts made of composite materials. For example, in the aeronautic field, wing skins, coating panels and fuselage sections are parts which can be manufactured using composite materials.
These parts are generally made with laminates of composite material fabrics with carbon fibers arranged in different orientations.
These parts are designed by means of a complex process comprising calculation steps, steps for designing the fabric model and for analyzing their producibility, with feedback loops when modifications are introduced in any of these steps.
Engineers who are specialists in calculations use calculation programs to calculate the performance of the part under given loads, and design engineers use CAD systems to generate the fabric model, i.e. define the location and contour of the fabrics forming the laminate, from the laminate specifications provided by the results of the calculation.
Even with CAD systems functionalities, the process for generating the mentioned fabric models in CAD systems is a tedious process involving a large amount of repetitive manual work, with the subsequent risk of failures, especially in the case of curved parts in which the definition of the contour of the fabrics, ensuring that certain requirements are complied with, is very complex and laborious.
Although the process can be more or less simplified depending on the CAD system used, when the designers are faced with complex support surface where the geometric computation is slow, the times for generating the fabric models of the parts can be excessively long. The designer may lose his or her concentration, making more mistakes due to the downtimes that the CAD system generates in the geometric operation computation. This is added to the fact that in some cases such as in tubular surfaces, the fabric model can be so complex that after hours of work, there is no clear vision of the work done due to the confusion caused by the geometry intersection in three-dimensional space.
The present invention intends to solve this problem.